A day at home-Weekend trip

Today we tried to get back into a routine we had gotten away from because of different activities. Our routine usually goes as follows. We get up at 6 to 6:30 am, then the girls get up at around the same time or a little bit later. Then we have family breakfast (all our meals at home are family style). The girls favorite breakfast tends to be sausage and bread. They love eggs (which is great) and they eat their cereal not with milk, but with liquid yogurt. I think we now have this yogurt in the U.S. They will eat any cereal this way. We sometimes have fruit. They don't eat a lot of fruit except for mangoes which they love, as well as a fruit here called "Tomate de Arbol". This is a tomato with a harder shell than we are used to in which we add 'panela', hard brown sugar. The girls love this. Sometimes we will fry yellow plantains for breakfast as well. They like this too. I think the girls have already gained weight and have grown in two weeks. I look at some of the pictures from the first day and some of the pictures now, and they look different. By the way, we are not allowed to post any pictures of the girls until the adoption is final, so this is why we have not posted any pictures of the girls yet. Hopefully we will do this in a couple of weeks. After breakfast, the girls take showers or dry their hair if they have taken a shower earlier. Then the girls work on two pages of Math. Then it's reading time and English practice. The girls have now learned some phrases mostly from our family meals. They are proud of what they know. After this I take the girls downstairs to the little park. We play there for a while. Then we come back up and they have free time while we prepare lunch. Lunch here is the heaviest meal of the day, although we have given the girls some heavy meals at night sometimes as well. It all depends what we have.
Today we followed our routine, but we had one of the beds collapse the night before so there was a guy here fixing the bed. I took the girls downstairs for a little while but then some moms with little ones came out. It was getting crowded with the babies and the older girls were getting silly so I took them back up. Sometimes it is so difficult here to keep them entertained on days like this because even though there are some things to do, we are limited to taxis and our guide Vicky. We do not take taxis very often and mostly rely on her. There are some things to do for kids here, but mostly there are a lot of shopping malls. Medellin is huge on shopping, and all the stores are just beautiful. Since the girls do not have friends outside of the orphanage and their old school (which they are no longer allowed to have contact with) nor extended family to visit, on days like this we spend the whole day together trying to do things at home, and eventually we go to the pool downstairs. I can see we are going to finally take advantage of that water park membership we have in Sun Prairie.
Tomorrow we are taking the girls to a 'finca' or small resort with pools, horseback riding etc. Our guide got us a great deal for it so we are spending a long weekend there (80 dollars a night for two rooms breakfast included!--I never talk about money but this was quite a deal, otherwise we would have never done it). Most families that come and adopt are offered a long weekend in the country or the beach at a nearby Island. We chose the former because the price was reasonable.
Another reason was because we are limited to being in town due to the fact that our bank is limiting us to a 500 dollars a day withdrawal (for security reasons). Because we need to pay most of our fees here in cash, and we felt uncomfortable bringing a large amount of cash with us, our bank limit has caused us major headaches. There are several payments that we have to make to the lawyer, our guide and paralegal who is in charge of recovering the original birth certificates and civil registry. This means that we must plan ahead and begin withdrawing money daily before the payments are due in order to have the amount of money that we need.
By the way, the girls are from a small town in the southern part of the Antioquia state (Abejorral), it is also mountainous so they are used to a little bit of cold. They will jump in the pool after dark, when the temperature here is in the 60s, something I (Mercedes) don't dare to do. Good practice for Crab Lake. Well.. we must finish packing for tomorrow. We don't know if our hotel in the Mountains will have Wi-Fi, so it is possible we might not blog until Monday. I know you are all getting used to reading our blog daily, so we apologize for this ahead of time.
--MM and AA